Down in the Hole

The BBC has shown all five series of The Wire, the amazing US crime drama, back to back. Sadly, the experience has now ended, leaving a void for those looking for intelligent and challenging television. In terms of thematic scope, narrative complexity and unwinking bleakness, both its ambition and its achievement were extraordinary. (No wonder its viewing figures were so disappointing). It's overly reductive, in fact, to categorise it as a crime drama - it's equally a compelling social documentary and an incisive study of the political process.

The Wire, from the outset, was an angry show, but the targets were never the obvious ones. The young black kids selling drugs on Baltimore's street corners, even the gang leaders, were portrayed with remarkable sympathy. Their worst actions were never condoned, but the environment which produced them was realised with unsparing intensity. The fourth series--for my money the best of the lot--focused on the schools' system and showed how it set the kids up to fail. The heartbreaking descent over the last two series of bright, articulate but alienated children into petty criminals and drug abusers did not pull any punches. The show's ire was not aimed at an underclass which never had a chance, but at a venal political class, more concerned with outmanoeuvring rivals and extorting kickbacks. Even the best of the politicians, like Mayor Carcetti, were ground down, forced into grubby and expedient compromise--and ultimately shown to be more concerned with career advancement than solving the city's problems. Sobering stuff, but never less than gripping.

The show wasn't without its faults. The second series, about the decline of the city's shipping industry, was never really integrated with the wider narrative. And while the characterisation was almost uniformly subtle, fresh and nuanced, there was one exception (heresy follows). McNulty, the nominal star of the ensemble show, the only actor to be billed out of alphabetical order on the credits, never fully departed from the maverick cop stereotype. A hard drinker, a womaniser, a lone wolf who breaks the rules with impunity (to a barely credible extent in the last series), he's a figure we've all seen before. Dominic West plays the role with brio, but he's not given enough to work with. Clarke Peters as Detective Freamon is a quieter and more plausible maverick.

These are minor quibbles. The Wire is uncompromising, and while at the end it delivers hope for some of the characters (and to avoid spoilers I won't say which ones), it's not at the expense of soft-soaping its wider message. A powerful, intelligent critique which never patronises its audience, we may never see its like again.

Why Should I Read...?

The Sunne in Splendour
Sharon Kay Penman, 1982

They say there is no creature in nature, however seemingly malign, which doesn't have a benign impact somewhere (the ichneumon wasp would seem to come close). Even Ken Follett, whose truly appalling novel World Without End befouled my mind for a fortnight, can been seen to have a positive effect; when I was reading some reviews to see if anyone else thought it as bad as I did, I came across a couple of approbatory references to Sharon Kay Penman, along the lines of "this is how it should be done".

So it was that I tracked down her best-known work, The Sunne in Splendour, a vast saga covering the Wars of the Roses from 1459 to the Battle of Bosworth a quarter of a century later. Although it deploys, very skilfully, multiple viewpoints, it is really the story of Richard, Duke of Gloucester--later Richard III. Penman takes the increasingly fashionable view that Richard's reputation was the result of propaganda designed to obscure the Tudors' tenuous right to the throne, and instead presents him in a highly positive (but still nuanced) light.

All but one of the main characters are drawn from history, so anyone familiar with the period or Shakespeare's history plays will have their own sense of who they are - which can only make Penman's task more difficult, but they are all realised with crispness, freshness and vigour: Edward IV, a man for a crisis but rudderless without one; Elizabeth Woodville, his calculating and ambitious parvenu Queen; John Neville, destroyed by his split loyalties; his brother Richard, 'the Kingmaker', at once charming, manipulative and egostistical. Penman is accomplished in drawing subtle characters, and while she is clearly sympathetic to the Yorkist cause, the Lancastrians are not uniformly reviled.

I'm not giving anything away in saying there is no happy ending, and Penman is at her best when she touches on grief and loss. This is a book with real emotional power, and doesn't attempt to sugar-coat just how grim the period really was.

The book is not faultless: the extended courtship between Richard and Anne Neville is far too long, and the dialogue occasionally jars in its archaism (although at least the reader never cringes at excess modernity). Taken as a whole, though, it's magnificent, capturing the otherness of the 15th century in a world peopled with rich and believable characters. This is just about as good as historical fiction gets.

How will it influence me?

The first influence, strangely, is a negative one. Any thoughts I might have had of writing a Shakespearan wide-screen epic on the Wars of Roses are effectively scuppered, since The Sunne in Splendour does it so well. While I remain keen to tackle the Wars of the Roses, I'll need to find a different approach.

Nonetheless The Sunne in Splendour does show that the period lends itself to the epic tale. In that sense, it is more inspiration than encouragement.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• Historical fiction is set in the past (doh!), so don't try to modernise the diction or the mindset
  
• You can write a successful historical novel using primarily historical figures
  
• Just because Shakespeare's already done it doesn't mean you can't
  
• There are better choices than the Tudors for your historical novel
  
• You don't have to give 'em a happy ending
  

Anatomy of an Outline, Part VIII

Feasibility Study

One of way of thinking about preparing an outline is to think of it as a feasibility study. The outlining process forces a focus and concision upon what is originally a nebulous idea. By refining the original idea it's possible to see what works and what doesn't and–perhaps more pertinently–whether what's coming out fits in with your interests and strengths as a writer.

This is perhaps more the case with historical fiction than fantasy: in the latter, if a key ingredient is missing, you can make it up, but in a historical there are those pesky facts... these can be either a framework, or a constraint, depending on how you view it.

Let's look at this in terms of my own outline-in-progress, The Inheritance Powders, which as you'll remember treats a poisoning scandal at the court of Louis XIV. After a couple of months of research I feel well-informed on the events and the wider period, although perhaps not well enough to start writing yet (this may be a displacement mechanism, of course).

The main elements of what such a story would look like are clear: we have the political intrigue between the various court figures, a claustrophobic thriller/mystery, filtered through the etiquette and manners of the period. Even without knowing whose story this is, the bare bones of the outline are visible at this point. They're all things which interest me and which, with some more research, I can turn into fiction. What is even more helpful about "outlining the outline" in this way, though, is that it shows what's not there. This gives me the opportunity either to shoe-horn it in at this relatively early stage, or acknowledge that the outline simply doesn't work for what the purpose I'm intending it–hence its value as a feasibility study.

What's missing from The Inheritance Powders (not in any objective sense, but in terms of what I do and don't want to do in fiction) is the sense of the epic. This was one of the aspects of The Dog of the North I thought worked best, and its absence weakened The Last Free City. The court of Louis XIV simply doesn't have this–a long and stable reign, with life at Versailles dominated by triviality. Warfare is largely an afterthought–Louis took his mistresses on most of his campaigns, which suggests that we are not in total warfare territory here. The Affair of the Poisons itself is claustrophobic, overheated–essentially small-scale magnified by hysteria. Those are the constraints that I need to accept if I want to write about those events. (In fantasy, it would be less of a problem, because I could more easily create a contrasting environment to sit alongside it).

There are many strands of historical fiction, and not all of them can be explored in a single novel. The Inheritance Powders does not readily lend itself to what we might call the 'Bernard Cornwell' slice of the market - the grand sweep of battle, the thunder of nation-changing affairs. If I want to write that kind of novel, then I'm drawn more towards one of my earlier ideas - the Wars of the Roses.

Luckily I'm now off on holiday for a week (with a couple of Sun King books stashed in my luggage) so I've got plenty of time to mull this over without too much self-imposed pressure. A novel is for life (or at any rate, a couple of years), not just for Christmas; so it pays to make the right choice.

The Serendipitous Discovery

...or why Amazon needs the High Street bookshop

I spent some time browsing round Waterstones in Guildford yesterday, knowing I had a couple of hours or so to kill. It's an entirely different experience to trying to cram a visit into a lunch hour you didn't really have time to take in the first place. Mooching around the shelves gives the kind of opportunity to discover new writers in a way that Amazon, for all its "customers who shopped for Seven Habits of Highly Effective People also bought Who Moved My Cheese?" can never fully replicate.

So let's say you were writing a noir detective novel, you know the kind of thing - a former cop with battered integrity, a beautiful but dangerous woman, the police as corrupt as the criminals. Where would you set something like that? First answer, because you know the cliches and you read Chandler, Hammett, Ellroy, is Los Angeles. Unless you love to be derivative, you'll probably move beyond that. How about, instead, 1930s Berlin? Perfect, no? That's where Philip Kerr has set March Violets, the first of a series of novels about Bernhard Gunther, a private investigator trying to make a living as the Nazis consolidate their grip on Germany. As Gunther wryly observes, there's no shortage of missing persons cases, as long as you take commissions from Jews.

As the subject matter suggests, this may tread a well-worn thriller path but the setting means it's hardly light entertainment. In the 60 pages I've read so far, Kerr has got inside the mind of the Reich, and particularly the ordinary Germans, in that peculiarly intimate way which novels can do better than straight history books. He has a nice way with the one-liner and brings the tawdriness of the period into sharp focus. This is a writer whose stories I want to read.

But here's my morally grubby compromise, my own noir moment. Having spent an hour reading the book on the soft seats at Waterstones, I didn't buy it. Seventeen quid for a paperback! (Admittedly a trilogy). Instead, I went home and bought it on Amazon for a tenner. (In my defence I should say I did buy three other books, rather more reasonably priced, in the shop instead). In this instance, Waterstones did OK - if every browser bought three books they'd be laughing - Amazon prospered too, as did four writers. And Penguin, the publisher, badged the trilogy as "Berlin Noir", an obvious title but one that got me take it off the shelf, so full marks to their marketing people.

If I were Waterstones I'd be worried that price-sensitive customers will always buy their books elsewhere (hence the ubiquity of the 3-f0r-2 table) but Amazon, equally, will surely realise that without bookshops acting as their physical showroom, their own commercial prospects will be damaged. Shoppers in Waterstones will buy books they didn't know they wanted, but on Amazon most purchases will still be consumers looking for a particular title. They may be in competition, but their markets are subtly different.

Meanwhile, as a I wait the "2 to 3 business days" for SuperSaver shipping (you didn't think I'd pay postage, did you?), I can reflect on my ethics as an "Amazon Tart".

Anatomy of an Outline, Part VII

Water Sculptures

Every day you probably pour yourself a glass of water without even thinking about it. What could be more prosaic? It's unlikely that you'd describe it as art.



In the right hands, though, water clearly is art: look at these two amazing images from liquidsculpture.com

All three pictures are essentially the same thing: H2O in different contexts. What makes the latter two art is the craft and the creativity the artist has applied.

There are analogies here to outlining a historical novel. I've spent the past fortnight doing some pretty immersive research into the life and times of Louis XIV and the specifics of the Affair of the Poisons. I'd now say that I'm fairly well-informed on the subject, but I'm still a huge leap away from having a story. What I've been doing so far is filling the glass with water: a necessary step in creating anything more ambitious, but not in itself art.

I need now to arrange the water in a way which gives it pattern and meaning, rather than simply presence. However much I know about the Affair of the Poisons, I don't have a novel--and knowing more won't put me any closer to it. I could write down now a detailed timeline (indeed, I've already done so and no, Aliya, it isn't on a spreadsheet...) of sudden deaths, interrogations and executions, but if I used that to construct a prose narrative I'd do nothing but confuse the reader.

The most difficult part of the writing process for me--and this seems even more the case for historical fiction than fantasy--is moving from the mass of background information to a dramatically satisfying organisation of the material. In other words, the part where we find a story. How many viewpoints will I have? Who will they be - La Reynie, the dogged detective who is investigator, judge and jury? Louvois, his boss, motivated more by a desire to outflank his hated rival Colbert than a quest for justice? Lesage, alchemist, conman, fantasist who finds himself in more trouble than he realises? Madame de Montespan, fading mistress of the king; her life would be so much easier if the beautiful young Mademoiselle de Fontanges was off the scene? Primo Visconti, waspish Italian observer of the court scene who enjoys playing the fortune-teller? The Marquis de Termes, his fortune lost in an earlier scandal who kidnaps an alchemist to make him a new one? Or characters entirely of my own devising?

These are the decisions which will make our story: when our glass of water will take on the outline of sculpture.

Anatomy of an Outline, Part VI

A Sense of Entitlement

At some stage in the outlining process you will want to think about titles. This can come at any point. The Dog of the North as a title existed long before the story it told; The Last Free City lagged some way behind; ; Dragonchaser was cropped from Dragonchaser and Lady Iseult's Delight at a late stage.

Ryan David Jahn blogs about this very question over at Guns and Verbs. In general I don't feel happy starting a story without having a title, even if that remains provisional until the book is finished. A title gives a reassuring solidity, a sense of something concrete behind it. It also, as Will Atkins pointed out to me this week, focuses the writer on what the story is about: Betrayal in the Boudoir would be a rather different take on the court of Louis XIV than Colbert's Conspiracy. (Neither sounds much cop: The Man in the Iron Mask is much better but I'm 150 years too late on that one).

For the time being, my story remains The Inheritance Powders: allusive without being obvious, with the focus on the central mystery, the poisonings. I stumbled across it in my reading, the internet supplying me with a link to the introduction to Strange Revelations by Lynn Mollenauer. This included the marvellous summary:

...magical remedies, love charms, and poisons known as “inheritance powders.” The inheritance powders, usually made from powdered toads steeped in arsenic, lent the Affair of the Poisons its name...

Naturally I filed this away for future use.

The obvious title would have been The Affair of the Poisons, but this risked confusion with Anne Somerset's factual account of the same name - and is any event more suitable for history than a novel.

My initial choice settled upon Hall of Mirrors, a perfectly serviceable choice. Ostensibly it refers to the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, but of course there are overtones of illusion, chicanery and deceit, all of which are likely to feature in the novel. There are counter-arguments, though. The phrase "hall of mirrors" is perhaps too much of a commonplace to be an ideal title for a novel; and the Hall at Versailles was not completed and opened for court functions until 1684 - after the conclusion of the Affair of the Poisons. There are ways around this latter point, but it's probably not a good idea to try to fit the story around the title at such an early stage.

So The Inheritance Powders it is, for now at least.

Anatomy of an Outline, Part V

You're now at the stage of being deep into your research. You should be feeling ever more enthralled about the period you've chosen, with characters becoming more solid in your head, and little details filed away for future use ("Sire, the rain at Marly is never wet", says one toady when Louis XIV apologises for making him go out in the rain). If that deepening excitement is not happening, it may be time to reconsider whether you've chosen the right period.

This might also be the time when you want to discuss your ideas with someone else, although this part is strictly optional. I mention it only because I had lunch with Will, my editor (or perhaps more accurately, former editor) at Macmillan earlier in the week--something that I found invaluable. If Will had felt the project had no commercial potential, better to know at an early stage; fortunately, however, he was as enthusiastic as I was about the idea. The need to articulate the idea to someone else is also a helpful discipline, and gave me a better idea of what the story is likely to be about. Because Will knows and likes my work, we were able to draw out together which aspects of the scenario are likely to be a good fit with my writing and fictional interests. I came away from the meeting not only with my excitement intact, but also with a much clearer idea of the themes and shape of the story. Will also suggested ideas for a framing story and a narrative device which I wouldn't necessarily have evolved myself.

We also discussed titles, and it was only after this conversation that I realised that what I had thought was my second-favourite was in fact my favourite: The Inheritance Powders, this being a term used at the time for poisons used to hasten the death of an inconvenient person.

* * *

Meanwhile, I'm making excellent progress with Love and Louis XIV. Antonia Fraser predictably portrays the female characters in a more sympathetic--and generally more credible--light than Vincent Cronin. She's even making me reappraise my initial dislike of Madame de Maintenon. (Having two contradictory views of her in my head is an encouraging development--the result on the page is much more likely to be rounded and interesting to the reader). Fraser is much more interested in the relationships between the main players than she is in the wider political dimensions--which is why you need to read widely around the subject. No one source will give you everything you need.

Anatomy of an Outline, Part IV

Before the football season starts, players engage in pre-season training. Before they actually play any football, they have to get themselves into the right physical condition. It doesn't feel like playing football, and it may be weeks before a ball is involved, but without that preparation the season is destined to fail.

At the moment, I'm doing the equivalent of pre-season training for writing my outline: that stage where I'm not doing anything approximating writing, but getting myself into condition to do so. That means putting in some legwork to learn more about my chosen period--in this case, France in the time of Louis XIV. At this stage, I'm not even narrowing my researches down to 1679-82, the timeframe for the Affair of the Poisons. I need to have a better sense of the period before I focus in so tightly.

I've now read my first biography of Louis XIV, and as a primer it couldn't have been better. Written by Vincent Cronin in 1960, it's pleasantly dated: Cronin is quite happy to moralise throughout in a way that really isn't fashionable today. He'll infer character from handwriting and physiognomy in a manner that fell out of favour in the 19th century, and his approbation of the Sun King is so excessive as to constitute hagiography. For me, it's absolutely perfect: it presents Louis as he may have liked to see himself, and gives vivid, if tendentious, pictures of some of the key figures of the Grand Siecle. In this way it gives me an overview plus an imagined construct of character - the kind of broad strokes that are highly useful in coming to grips with the period. And if sometimes he irritates me so much that I form exactly the opposite view of a character than he intended, so much the better. From such grit are pearls formed.

Nonetheless I need a corrective to Cronin's adulation, so next on my list is Antonia Fraser's The Loves of Louis XIV, which I suspect may take a different perspective. These contrasting reflections on historical figures are the starting point for creating nuanced characters.

My reading at this stage is primarily about milieu: getting a sense of the time I'm writing about, as well as constructing the superstructure of facts within which I will work. I'm also, as a secondary benefit, beginning to feel my way into some of the characters, such as Madame de Montespan, an important figure however little she may end up on stage. What I haven't done yet is start to excavate the plot (an apt metaphor, because ultimately I will need to trim away extraneous detail to leave the shape of the story I want to tell) or to create any characters outside of the historical record.

For now, that's absolutely fine: we're still in pre-season.

Anatomy of an Outline, Part III

Selection of milieu for a historical novel is only the first of many choices the author must make. In the worked example we are creating here, we have settled on the court of Louis XIV, more specifically 'The Affair of the Poisons'. In many ways, this is the easy bit.

The next, and perhaps most significant, choice is that of protagonist. The historical novelist is freighted with more options--and hence more opportunities for error--than the fantasist. The latter, to oversimplify a touch, makes up his characters and away he goes. The historical novelist has to determine the balance between 'real' historical characters and those solely the product of imagination. Philippa Gregory's Tudor novels use almost exclusively figures from the historical record; CJ Sansom's novels set in the same period mix and match, with the main characters invented. (This latter practice is known as 'ranulfism', according to this interesting if tendentious article). At the opposite end of the spectrum to Philippa Gregory, a writer like Matt Curran can use exclusively fictional characters in an historical setting.

We know enough about the Affair of the Poisons for it to be feasible to people a story about it entirely with characters from the historical record. The main players, Louis XIV, Madame de Brinvilliers, Madame de Montespan, La Reynie, are well enough documented that we can attempt to 'reconstruct' their characters as they might have been (even given differing interpretations by historians). However, this very availability of information can be an obstacle to the novelist, who after all is not aspiring to write a history textbook. The imaginative freedom of ranulfism can allow the writer to create the character the story needs, without distorting the reputation of a historical figure. Judith Merkle Riley, whose The Oracle Glass covers the same events, uses many historical characters but her protagonist is a ranulf.

There is no right answer to this question. The story the writer wants to tell will determine the best option. We should be clear, though, that even where characters in a novel are drawn from life, they will still be a fictional construct. One of the most vivid of all characters in historical fiction, Robert Graves' Claudius, may be informed by Graves' extensive reading of Plutarch and Suetonius -- but the character on the page is all Graves.

Anatomy of an Outline, Part II

For the sake of argument, we'll assume I've selected the subject of my next project (in practice it isn't quite that straightforward: I'm meeting my editor Will next week to talk through some ideas). As some of you know, because we've discussed it in person, I'm looking to work up an outline on The Affair of the Poisons:

The Affair of the Poisons was a murder scandal in France during the reign of King Louis XIV. It launched a period of hysterical pursuit of murder suspects, during which a number of prominent people and members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced for poisoning and witchcraft.

The sensational trial drew attention to a number of other mysterious deaths, starting a number of rumors. Prominent people, including Louis XIV, became alarmed that they also might be poisoned. He told Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, who, among other things, was his chief of police, to root out the poisoners. The subsequent investigation of potential poisoners led to accusations of witchcraft, murder and more.

--Wikipedia

This ticks many of my fictional boxes: court intrigue, conspiracy, murder and mayhem, a clear and distinct society with its own punctilios and protocols. It's not a period I'm immensely familiar with, but in truth whatever period I had chosen, extensive research would be necessary.

The next stage of preparing an outline is do some research. I need now to spend some time immersing myself in the period and the details of the Affair of the Poisons. Research, for me, begins with Wikipedia. This is perhaps a controversial position, but as long as iresearch doesn't also end there, I don't see a difficulty with it. Wikipedia may not be original scholarship but where it is excellent is in making links between related fields of knowledge. A free-wheeling hour on Wikipedia can be very helpful both to gain a thematic overview and to extract some telling detail. In this case, Wikipedia was very helpful in drawing my attention to the Fronde, a kind of covert nobles' coup in Louis XIV's minority--outside of the timeline of the story but clearly important in terms of how the court, and Louis, viewed themselves a generation later.

We move next to some more detailed reading, both specific and general. The starting point here is Anne Somerset's The Affair of the Poisons, the standard English-language popular history of the events. I've read this before and re-reading is now in order. I've also summoned up two biographies, Louis XIV by Vincent Cronin and The Loves of Louis XIV (Antonia Fraser). This gives me two different perspectives on king and court. Finally, I've also acquired the only English language novel I'm aware of on the subject, The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley.

Many would advise against reading other novels treating your intended subject. I take the point, but from what I know of the book, its preoccupations are rather different to mine; I hope it will illuminate rather than constrain my imagination.

Some of my more informal research included speaking to real live French people. There was a clear consensus here that if I wanted to cover this period, I needed to read Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, and for various reasons this seems to me a worthwhile pursuit.

That's my summer reading taken care of. Note that at this stage I am not even close to knowing the plot (the Affair of the Poisons is too large to fit everything in). I don't even know the characters, or the mixture of historical and fictional ones. These are the things which will determine the flavour of the book, but at this stage in my knowledge, those decisions are premature.